Awesome Joolie

The people watching here is amazing. It's nerds on parade, flowing through the aisles like a river, and it's beautiful. Blue hair, cat T-shirts, punny tote bags ("Sofa King Rad," with a little cartoon king poking his sword and crown out of a couch-cushion fort was my favorite). Hot dog tights.

HOT DOG TIGHTS. Jammed into black patent-leather platform shoes.

One guy in his early 20s breathlessly told me, "I love this place because at home we're all weird but then we get together and you see how many of us there are!" I wanted to hug him but instead I just sold him a sticker. My face hurts from smiling. Some of that is come-buy-our-stuff customer service smiling, true, but mostly it's genuine.

Freshly-painted heads. Photo by Eric.

Tomorrow morning we fly to Los Angeles to attend Designer Con, an art and toy extravaganza in Pasadena. Eric rented a booth there and has been feverishly painting, designing, printing, and packaging toys nearly every day for the past several months. It's been intense.

A couple of krampuses. Photo also by Eric.

He's been playing around with customizing existing toys for a long time, but it's only in the past few years that he's ramped up his efforts and started designing his own figures and putting them out. He even wrote a backstory for the latest batch. I'm extraordinarily proud of him--plus I'm excited to go take in the spectacle of ~300 toy vendors in one place.

His website is here and he is krotpong on Instagram if you want to go see what I'm talking about.

The agency I work for had a group photo taken* in the Senate chamber today. It was a lovely clear morning, so we eschewed the underground tunnel that connects our building to the Capitol and walked over outside together. People were a little dressed up and there was a giddy, field-trip feel to the whole thing. You don't get that too often as an adult.

An air of release hung about the day, even after we returned to our desks after the picture was taken. Maybe office workers should have recess too.

*Or "made," if you want to be really Texan about it.

I gotta get my blogging act together. There's not much point in doing a posting-every-day challenge if I keep throwing up some lazy crap just to check the "I blogged today" box. Yet I'm going to do it again tonight.

Worse, I'm blogging about blogging. Few things are more self-consciously annoying than that.

Anyway. How are you?

Enjoy scenic Central Texas.

I am still very sad and angry that there will not be a high-speed train between Austin and Dallas anytime soon, if even in my lifetime. The drive from my house to my parents' is about three and a half hours, which always gives me plenty of time to sulk about that and also fantasize about alternatives.

Lately I've been wishing we could have a car train, or some kind of a land ferry, where you pay to link or load your car onto a giant truck and just sit back and relax as you ride from city to city.

This would also solve the problem of connectivity on either end--a train would be great, but face it, there isn't a city in Texas where you wouldn't want to have a car, unless you only need to visit the central core of the bigger cities.

The only problem would be where to sit. Ideally you'd just ride in your own vehicle, but you'd need a climate-controlled cabin. Idling all the vehicles to keep the a/c going would defeat the purpose.

I'm sure someone smarter than me can figure that part out, though, and then we can all show up at our destinations fresh and relaxed.

It's 1 am but it's still Saturday night. My stepmom had her 60th birthday party tonight. It was full of family and family friends--people I've known my whole life, or at least more than half of it.

There is always awkwardness and some regret that I don't keep in better touch, or didn't live up to potential, or aren't more outgoing (and therefore a different person altogether), but mostly it's pretty incredible to have people who are with you for the whole ride.

There is some, which is kind of amazing to me. I just ordered some cheeseburger mac-n-cheese abomination that comes with pickles. I forgot to optimize my mobile blogging setup before leaving town. That's all.

Not much happened today. I got up, made a smoothie, went to work, came home, got takeout, came back home and ate it, and walked the dogs. That was it; that was Thursday. I did not live a great story, as the fake-inspirational wheatpaste signs all over town would have us do.

I do have a few small things to share, though.

The first is this great Vine someone made. You'll have to turn the sound on and let it loop, oh, 20-30 times to get the full effect:

(Aw, come on, play it one more time!)

The second is that I figured out how to flip the bird in iMessage while playing around texting with my friend Leslie.

The new emoji update gave us the little middle finger guy, and it's wonderful. But sometimes you need a bolder, more abstract statement, and that is this:

I sure told them, whoever they are!

(No one was really a jerk to me today. But if someone ever is...)

Photo credit: Len Burgess

Today I planted the passionflower vine my friend Phyllis* gave me the other week. It was tricky, since I was planting it in sloping clay soil, and it took a lot of effort to dig a big level hole in that sticky dirt. Also there was apparently a little city of mosquitoes living in the pot it came in, so even though I had coated myself in DEET I had a tiny cloud of observers hovering a few inches from my efforts.

No problem; I got it in. I hope it likes its new home.

I put it next to the deck in hopes that it will twine up the railings. The plant itself is not nearly as dramatic as its Seussian flower, is it?

It didn't seem that thrilled about being moved to begin with, and the caterpillars were feasting on it heartily, so it looks a little sickly. But if this is a good spot for it, I'm sure it will do fine.

This caterpillar tried to hitch a ride on my gardening glove. Nice try, buddy.

Photo credit: Vicki DeLoach

My friend and coworker Larry told me these guys will eventually become Gulf fritillary butterflies, and I'm really looking forward to having them around. I noticed a few of the caterpillars strayed from the plant when I was driving it home--I peeled one off the gear shift the next morning--so maybe I'll have butterflies in the cabin of my car, too.

*Yep, there's Phyllis again. Some people have this way about them that you spend one evening with them and they influence you for weeks, or sometimes years.

I was riding my bike to work this morning and hit a spot where the cycle track ran out at the end of the block and was replaced by a bike lane at the other side of the intersection. This was no big deal but did require me to veer slightly to the left, a little closer to the car lane.

(Here's a diagram, since I find it hard to visualize these things and Google Earth isn't up-to-date on the Mueller development.)

I heard a car coming up behind me right as I hit the intersection, and I fully expected it to gun past, which is what I prefer and what most drivers used to sharing the road with bicycles do. Just get past me as quickly and safely as possible and we'll be out of each others' hair forever.

This car instead slowed and hovered behind my left side as I drifted over into the bike lane. Argh, dude, just pass me! You're making me nervous.

I turned around to see how close it was and realized it was a Google self-driving car* on a test drive, cautiously waiting while I made my lane shift.

Once I realized what was going on I relaxed because I knew I wasn't in danger of being plowed into by an inexperienced driver or, worse, a texting one. Still, given how cars and bikes usually interact, the Google cars' real-world behavior could use a little finessing.

Self-driving cars are a fantastic idea, but this very brief encounter made me realize the transition period between human and robot drivers means we will have to account for two sets of behaviors and two sets of assumptions. It might get hairy for a while.

*One of the Lexuses, not the super-cute deliberately benign-looking ones. Sadly.